Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
In theory, I knew that this kind of thing can happen in any family. Upstanding citizens are always turning out to be secret criminals, and I wouldn't even call my cousin Alan an upstanding citizen. But it's one thing to know and another thing to understand.
Alan, murder me?
What the hell was Alan thinking? From Serial Productions and The New York Times, I'm Em Gessen, and this is The Idiot. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
What is the status of America's war with Iran? If you are trying to follow it through what President Trump is saying, you are going to be, I have become, hopelessly lost. Trump, within a single day, will veer wildly between saying the war is almost over and that he's preparing to escalate it dramatically. That negotiations are going great. and that there's no one to talk to.
That Iran must open the Strait of Hormuz, and that America doesn't care if it's closed. On Wednesday night, in a nationally televised address, Trump sought to finally clear the fog, to make the path forward clear to the American people and to our allies.
I've made clear from the beginning of Operation Epic Fury that we will continue until our objectives are fully achieved. Thanks to the progress we've made, I can say tonight that we are on track to complete all of America's military objectives shortly, very shortly. We're going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks.
We're going to bring them back to the Stone Ages where they belong.
It's all hard to say which goals exactly we've achieved. Because from another perspective, Iran seems to think it's winning this war. The regime has survived. It has learned how much power it can exert over the world economy by choking up the Strait of Hormuz. It has seen sanctions lifted on its oil. It's looking towards a new order where it charges countries to pass through the Strait.
And Trump appears to be abandoning the Strait. That, I think, was the most shocking part of his speech, telling our allies it's their problem now. The promise Trump made was an end to threats from Iran. He repeated that promise on Wednesday night.
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Chapter 2: What is the status of America's war with Iran?
Well, it was a lot of the same demands that the president and his negotiators had put on the table prior to the war itself. So he wants a durable commitment to no enrichment, to no nuclear weapons in the program in the future. He was looking for a number of other steps that the Iranians would take to end their support for proxies, to end their ballistic missile program.
These have all been longstanding concerns on the part of the United States. They really do date back to even the negotiations that the Obama administration led that produced a deal that temporarily put constraints on a number of Iran's nuclear activities. And I think what President Trump is trying to achieve is what he's been pushing for throughout both his first and second terms.
And he's not able to achieve conclusively through military action.
How did the Iranians respond?
The Iranians effectively believe that they have the upper hand at this point in time. And so they have indicated that they don't really see themselves as prepared to negotiate directly with Washington.
They are embittered, obviously, as a result of the negotiations that were taking place both in the days before the president launched the strikes about a month ago, as well as the same sort of dynamics that preceded the June war.
where negotiations were really just a prelude to military action and in some effect, to some extent, a ruse to dupe the Iranians into complacency, even as the attack was being mobilized. And so, you know, it's a little bit difficult to get direct diplomacy with Tehran in the best of circumstances. This is a regime that has you know, sort of based its ideology on anti-Americanism.
It has often frequently, in fact, refused to deal directly with American negotiators. And so, you know, under the current circumstances where there have been thousands of strikes and many deaths in Iran, including some of the top leadership, they're not terribly inclined to sit down, nor are they particularly inclined to compromise with the United States.
Why do they believe they have the upper hand?
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Chapter 3: How does President Trump's rhetoric impact perceptions of the conflict?
They believe they have the upper hand precisely because they were able to seize control of the Strait of Hormuz, which is, of course, the strategic waterway through which about 20% of the world's oil and natural gas exports pass on a daily basis. What the Iranians did in the first days of the war was to strike at ships that were passing through the Gulf.
and effectively persuade insurers and shipping companies and oil companies to avoid the Gulf unless they had some kind of assurance from the Iranians that they could pass. And so what we've seen is in the pre-war period, there would be anywhere from 130 to 140 tankers traveling to and from over the Strait of Hormuz every day. We've seen only a handful take place over the course of the past month.
And that has had a severe impact on oil exports, on prices for oil around the world. And it will, over time, have a catastrophic impact on the global economy if there isn't a resolution to this stoppage of the strait.
Go a little deeper on that for me. Why does that give them the upper hand? They've had, I think, more than 10,000 sites attacked by U.S. and Israel. They've had a huge number of senior political and military leadership killed in strikes. They are militarily tremendously outmatched.
So, yes, they've been able to close the strait that is sending energy prices, fertilizer prices, other key components of the global economy rising. But so what? That's pain for them, too. Why do they seem so confident?
They can afford to wait. They have already suffered, as you know, tremendous losses to the leadership. This has had a terrible impact on Iranian cities across the country. But in effect, they have the advantage of time at this point in time, because every day that the stoppage goes on, the impact on the global economy is magnified.
And that will have a direct impact on President Trump's political standing. It also hurts all of America's partners and allies in the region and around the world. This is creating huge constraints in Asia.
And that is going to be something that the United States is going to hear from all of its partners and allies when it's engaged in diplomacy, that they are looking to see an end to this war, too. And so for the Iranians, this is an existential crisis. They're prepared to wait this out as long as they can. And I think that's the real question now. Who blinks first?
Talk to me for a minute about the timing. So Trump, as you know, he seems much more incentivized to end this quickly than the Iranians do, at least in the two sides' public statements. And my understanding is that we are entering this period where the closure of the strait is going to start really biting Iranians. the global flow of energy and commodities.
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Chapter 4: What are Trump's military options in relation to Iran?
They also did not have a political movement that they could turn to that could in fact potentially challenge the system at a moment of vulnerability. They could go to the streets, but they had done so only a month before, and they had been slaughtered in historic numbers by the regime itself, and they could see that those forces were still out there
Government officials were sending text messages. The pace of executions of dissidents and protesters has remained high. They're sending a very clear signal to the population, don't you dare take this opportunity. And in the aftermath of the massacres that occurred in January, it's understandable that Iranians weren't going to take that risk.
For the same reason, the deeply embedded nature of the regime, this is why we're not seeing a different perspective of or a more pragmatic or rational perspective from those who are somewhere lower in the ranks of the regime itself. When the top echelon was killed, their successors in many ways are more radical or more hardline. That was true of the Supreme Leader himself.
He's been replaced by his son, who had fewer religious credentials, less political experience. but is very closely aligned with the Revolutionary Guard and is likely to govern in a much more, even more authoritarian way than his father. And that's been true of many of the figures who've come into senior positions as individual leaders have been picked off.
It is a much more heavily militarized regime, but one that has no real differentiation in terms of the anti-American, anti-Israeli radical ideology.
Trump told the Financial Times, speaking here of Khamenei's son, who's now the new Supreme Leader, quote, the son is either dead or in extremely bad shape. We've not heard from him at all. He's gone. What do we know about who's in charge?
It's a very good question. What we know are that there are still a number of officials, most of which have senior military experience, who appear to be essentially running the government.
There is also a sort of administrative side to the governance in Iran, which is still being led by a president who was elected in the aftermath of the death of another potential contender for the supreme leader just a couple of years ago. He has very little power, but he can keep the system running. The key figures are those from the military.
Mojtaba Khamenei, who has been named the supreme leader, who has issued several statements, has not been seen in public. There are a wide range of rumors about the state of his health, that he may have been grievously injured in the same attack that killed his father, his mother, his wife, and other members of his family on the first day of the war.
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Chapter 5: Why does Iran believe it has the upper hand in the conflict?
How would you describe the state of the goal of ensuring Iran will never have a nuclear weapon?
I think we are still some ways away from ensuring that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon. And that is simply because Iran still has the technical expertise and it still has potentially large quantities of highly enriched uranium, which would enable it to move quickly.
This current state of the war, this current round of strikes has done even more significant damage to Iran's nuclear infrastructure than was done during the June war. And so it has compounded the technical challenge that the Iranians will have to reconstitute the program.
But as long as they have the expertise, as long as they have the potential fuel and they have the know-how to build the machines and create the infrastructure, They can get there again. And, you know, what we know is that Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader who was killed, was in fact one of the sources of some constraint on the decision to move forward or not with a weapons program.
Iran had a weapons program which it put on ice in 2003 after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The intelligence community has been somewhat confident that that weapons program was not active at this time, but we can't verify that. And we know that much of Iran's activities were underground.
And so there isn't the level of visibility and confidence that we have hit every possible element of the program, even in the second round of war.
How about the ballistic missiles program?
The latest that we've heard is that the U.S. assesses that about 30 percent of Iran's missile capabilities have been taken out by strikes. They've also expended some of the rest of their missiles in their own strikes. But we believe that they still have both the missiles, the launchers.
And again, even if the production facilities have been destroyed, they have the capability to rebuild at some point in time. We have seen the Israelis in particular take wider strikes, clearly aimed at undermining the larger economic infrastructure in Iran, whether it was at the South Pars gas field or the more recently the steel manufacturing plants around the country.
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Chapter 6: How has the closure of the Strait of Hormuz affected global oil prices?
However, you know, it's a very real possibility. We know the Iranians have had relationships with terror networks all around the world. They've had the capability to affect terrorist attacks from Asia to Europe to Latin America.
And while we haven't seen a lot of that on American soil in the very near term, we know that they credibly threatened both Iranian dissidents living in the United States as well as former senior officials, some of whom served in the first Trump administration and retained their government protection until President Trump came back into office last January.
We began this conversation by talking in part about the proposed 15-point peace plan from the Trump administration. We talked about the Iranian response to that. One thing you hear from Donald Trump is various reports on how negotiations are going. One thing you hear from the Iranian government is that there are no negotiations ongoing. Are there negotiations ongoing?
There are always negotiations ongoing. I think it's highly unlikely that we have Americans and Iranians sitting across the table from one another. But there are messages that are being passed. There are efforts that are being launched. And particularly if the president goes forward with his announcements at various points in time that we are simply going to leave Iran.
Once the mission is finished, even if the strait is not open, we do see other actors coming to try to play a larger role, particularly the Chinese, the Pakistanis. Others are looking for some sort of an opportunity to end this crisis because, you know, this will impact the entire world if it plays out for weeks and months unended.
How serious are the Pakistani and Chinese efforts here? And ask this from two perspectives. One, could they actually create the forum in which this is brought to some kind of conclusion? But two, if America launches a ill-thought-through war with Iran that then ends in some kind of confusing, somewhat humiliating absence of achieved objectives—
And the people who ended are the Chinese who come in as the adults in the room to sort of help negotiate a settlement. I don't know, if I imagine a historian writing a book on changing world orders in 50 years, that might feel to me like one of those moments when you begin to see the balance of responsibility and weight shifting in the global order.
Well, I think however this ends, it is a critical juncture. It is the end of American global leadership. It is the end or the diminishment of our partnerships and alliances that have been so critical in the post-war era to preserving stability and security and prosperity in many places.
And what's also interesting is that the timeline for the end of this crisis is very much also influenced by the Chinese, because the president had scheduled a summit in Beijing. He moved that as a result of the war being a bit more protracted than he had presumably intended. But that new date for the summit in Beijing is May 14th and 15th.
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